WASHINGTON — Add another Texan to the list of people under consideration for agriculture secretary: Elsa Murano, the former president of Texas A&M, will meet with President-elect Donald Trump next week to discuss the role.

Murano, a Cuban-American immigrant, is joining Susan Combs, the former Texas comptroller and agricultural commissioner, and Sid Miller, the current agricultural commissioner, on Trump's list for USDA chief.

Elsa Murano was the 23rd president of Texas A&M University.

Murano has experience with the Agriculture Department: Under President George W. Bush, she served as the undersecretary of agriculture for food safety, and was the highest-ranking food safety official in the United States.

She also served as A&M president for just over one year, during a period of high administrative turnover. Trump transition spokesman Jason Miller acknowledged her work there during a call with reporters on Thursday.

“Her track record of running a major university speaks for itself,” he said.

In fact, Murano's 17 months as president at A&M's flagship campus were complicated. Murano, the school's first woman and first Hispanic president, had political friction with then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry and other high-ranking Perry loyalists, which some speculate led to her eventual ousting.

Neither Murano nor Perry could be reached for comment.

In December 2007, the Texas A&M Board of Regents named Murano to the top job at A&M, even though she was not one of the three candidates a search committee had recommended. The chancellor at the time, Mike McKinney, was a former Perry chief of staff.

Murano soon named Lt. Gen. Joe Weber, a college roommate of Perry's, as the new vice president of student affairs. But she declined to name another Perry ally, former Pentagon official Brett Giroir, as vice president of research.

In response, McKinney created a brand new role for Giroir -- vice chancellor for research -- and worked to speed up Murano's departure. In addition to a series of closed-door meetings, McKinney gave Murano a scathing performance review that was soon released to the public. At the time, Murano said she "completely and absolutely" disagreed with his assessment of her performance -- but within days, she had resigned from the presidency.

Murano still teaches at A&M, where she is a professor in the nutrition and food science department. She also sits on the board of Hormel Foods, a Minnesota-based food manufacturing company.

The state of Minnesota is also one of the biggest advocates for irradiated food techniques, which Murano supports. Irradiation involves blasting meat with X-rays, gamma rays and electrons to kill certain pathogens, but critics say the full effects of the process are not known.

In her time working for the Bush administration, Murano unsuccessfully lobbied to lift a ban on irradiated meat in public schools. The directors of Food & Water Watch and the Center for Food Safety have long critiqued Murano's position.

"Scientifically documented effects of food irradiation raise serious concerns about the long-term health impacts of consuming a diet of irradiated food," they wrote in 2009.

Other food-safety experts, including James Hodges, the president of the American Meat Institute Foundation, call those critiques unnecessarily alarmist.

"Why would you want to prohibit [the practice] if there are no safety and health questions?" Hodges told The Washington Post in 2003. "The FDA has said it's safe to use on ground beef."

While Murano is set to meet with Trump next week, Combs met with Vice President-elect Mike Pence earlier this week, according to reports. Miller, meanwhile, sits on Trump’s agriculture advisory committee, and Trump often referred to Miller as one of his biggest supporters in Texas during the campaign.